Tongo Hills/Tengzug Shrines is an amazing place. It is a must see if you are in the North.

The Tongo Hills and Tengzug shrines constitute a unique cultural landscape. Proposed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the area is of outstanding natural beauty and cultural richness. The Hills, with their wondrous rock formations, caves, and natural rock shelters, are the sacred epicenter of the Talensis.

The unique landscape of the Tongo Hills is also home to numerous sacred shrines. Paramount among them is the ba’ar Tonna’ab ya’nee, nestled in the cliffs above the village of Tengzug. The hills also provide a stage for some of the most colorful and vibrant festivals in Ghana. The Boar’ daam, which takes place in late October and early November, is a harvest festival centered on the ancestor shrines. Golob comes at the end of the dry season in March and is focused on the greater earth shrine, No’on.

For centuries the Tongo hills formed part of a frontier belt between the conquest states of Dogbon and Mamprugu to the south and those of the Mossi Kingdoms to the north. Its dense population of agriculturists offered rich pickings for predatory slave raiders from the surrounding cavalry states. A large proportion of slaves in the Akan forest Kingdoms originated from these frontier communities. A final surge of southbound captives was generated by the activities of slave raiders in the 1880s-90s.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Tongo hills were widely recognized as an established site of sacred power. They were also among the last areas in Ghana to submit to British rule. The ancestor shrine, Tonna’ab, served as a refuge for and potent symbol of those who resisted “pacification.” It was only in 1911 that the British finally moved to end that resistance. The Talensis were evicted from the hills and all access to sacred sites was banned. Yet only four years later, British officers realized that many people were returning clandestinely to the hills and that the shrines had been “reactivated.” Colonial forces mounted a second assault in 1915, but by the 1920s it was clear that the great ancestor shrine, Tonna’ab, was again flourishing and could not be destroyed. That same tenacity lives on today in the vibrant Talensi communities of the Tongo hills.